Faith No More: Classic or Dud

I became a fan last year after watching this vid, posted somewhere on this borad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZfr2QMk3Fc

Realllly want a US tour.

Seriously! Still kicking myself for missing them last time.

they'd better come to canada this time

New song posted:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/premieres/hear-faith-no-more-first-release-in-17-years-motherfucker-20141119

I fucking love it.

me too

You fucking wrote it you mook. (Well not the song, but you know...)

It's cool, can't help but think it'd be better if Patton did the verse vox as well though.

I love the downward spiralling outro.

this is way better than i ever would have expected

also is the dude on the right jim martin???

err far left i mean....stage right! (good cover ums)

Not Jim Martin. They hate him. Which saddens me.

Yeah but bit of a homophobic prick by all accounts so fair enough on their part.

I have hope this will be a rare not completely boring 90s rock band reunion record

Playing guitar with Infectious Grooves instead of Faith No More seems like proper punishment.

I have a certain degree of faith (pun intended) in the new album; the new song is solid, and Patton's been on decent form recently (the latest Tomahawk album is terrific).

also is the dude on the right jim martin???

It looks to me like Billy Bob Thornton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_iNK0mBKrQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b2OHDIEwQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bV0QnVIiZk

I remember watching this live and laughing so hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-4CcgA1Upo

There was a stretch of time when FNM were my favorite band, and I love all of the Mike albums to varying degrees. That said, not totally sold on the new song.

Just spent the morning watching this incredible show when I should've been working. No regrets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-WvTieSyEI

Puffy is such an awesome drummer.

I didn't like the last Tomahawk album, but I kind of like this. I can imagine it wearing thin quickly, but it's still a hell of a lot better than I expected.

This new song's getting some shit but I rather like it, especially if you take it as an intro track as intended rather than a lead single or something. I'm not the hugest FNM fan but I'm still pretty excited for the new album when it drops.

got my ticket to the Atlanta show. who else is catching this tour?

HOLLA :D

20th in SF

16th in Seattle.

Dud: Getting locked out of the show at the Electric Factory and seeing scalpers selling them for 3x face value moments later.
Classic: Having another show announced at a venue where you can actually see the stage and easily attaining tickets for that show.

New album has leaked.

i like motherfucker a lot!
angel dust was, for a time, the most important album in the world for me

i enjoyed the new album and i wasnt expecting to

It might be their best since Angel Dust.

They were great last night in SF

I don't think I've ever listened to Angel Dust all the way through, but King For a Day was one of my favourite albums as a teenager. Is that strange?

p weird, tbh

I started listening to an awful rip of it so I'll have to try again later. It didn't immediately grab me but that's not indicative of much. I didn't think a whole lot of Album Of The Year back in the day but it's really grown on me over the last several years.

normal for dog latin tbf

TBF Angel Dust came out (what felt like a) lifetime (i.e. 2 years) before I got into rock/metal music, so KFAD was the one my friends and I all got into. Didn't hear Angel Dust for at least decade after.

Album of the Year was much better than King For A Day but noone was interested by then (kfad seemed to put a lot of ppl off them which i found strange but ppl are fickle)

I don't remember much about the last quarter of KFAD but the first section and a half is top-notch.

KFAD is so all over the place tonally and stylistically (for a band that's already kinda all over the place) that I can understand why people might've been disappointed that it wasn't Angel Dust Part 2. Album of the Year is much more low-key and cohesive and it feels more like a continuation of what they did on Angel Dust than the actual follow-up did.

I really liked King for a Day. "Digging the Dave" is a great concise single with some great screaming from Patton. I also love "Evidence." Trey Spruance played guitar on the album, but I understand he had little to no creative input. The album would've probably been pretty crazy if that had happened.

KFAD is so all over the place tonally and stylistically (for a band that's already kinda all over the place) that I can understand why people might've been disappointed that it wasn't Angel Dust Part 2. Album of the Year is much more low-key and cohesive and it feels more like a continuation of what they did on Angel Dust than the actual follow-up did.

― I Stepped On Your Samwich (Old Lunch)

This is pretty much OTM. KFAD has some great catchy tunes, but often doesn't seem to be striving for much more than pastiche and as a result has something of a hollow glib air to it. Angel Dust, the much underrated Album of the Year and the new one are much more concerned with tonal and textural originality.

I kind of wanted to start a thread about all those 'great, eclectic nineties' albums that go out of their ways to mix and juxtapose genres as much as possible. KFAD is def one of those.

hehe digging the dave. was morrissey the guest vocalist on that remix?

Haha! I have no idea where that came from. Anyway, yeah, I like Digging the Grave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUcRItGaMnE

In summary: Small Victory vs Digging the Grave - seriously, is there a competition here in terms of which has the most teeth?

I mean, Digging The Grave is astonishingly linear and predictable, like a Helmet song with an opera singer over the top. It has a gutteral punch, but... Small Victory is circus organs and rave samples and sirens and stuka bomber riff runs and pop rap and wild croon and a million other different perverse levels and collisions. It has more ideas in four minutes than most albums.

I've been leaning in harder here than KFAD deserves, partly because I found it SO disappointing BITD. There's a lot to commend it - Ugly In the Morning and Cuckoo For Caca are thrillingly visceral, Just A Man walks that insidious tightrope where you're not sure if they mean it, maaaaan, or are lampooning that kind of overdriven balladry. But Angel Dust always seemed a mad masterpiece to me, the sound of a band who could conceivably do anything, and are hurtling in a million sick directions at once. That's the thrill for me, that one song could be a Tom Waitsian character portrait, the next could smoosh rave music into thrash metal, the next could be a macabre subterranean epic about wanking, and it could close on an aching John Barry cover. And there's still nothing on KFAD as genuinely unsettling, upsetting, terrifying as Jizzlobber.

After AD the unstable element is jettisoned, the friction, the discomfort. The danger.

I think they probably lost that element of danger when Jim Martin left- even though by all accounts he had checked out even during the recording of Angel Dust they probably needed the grit in the oyster that was his presence. But who knows? Often bands have it, then it goes, and Martin leaving may have been correlation not causation.

Fascinating to hear different perspectives on this though, I'll have to go back to KFAD and give it another go, I was disappointed at the time it was released too. FWIW I like Sol Invictus a lot, a solid record with the odd moment that transcends that description.

Small Victory is circus organs and rave samples and sirens and stuka bomber riff runs and pop rap and wild croon

I'm hearing something different to you then. (And I've heard this one many times as it was on the best of that came out in the 90s). I'll give it another listen

Points dismissed to KFAD in that the second side has a long string of parodic ballads and throwaway mid-tempo jams that don't do much for me. The opening 8 or 9 songs are gold tho

Maybe it's just the production on AD not lighting things up for me then. Small Victory is a fairly straightforward mid-tempo rock song to my ears. But now you mention it Stevie, yeah I hear the elements you mention but everything's just totally blown-out and the rave samples are so deeply buried in the mix they're hardly audible.

I like the visceral howl of Digging The Grave. Yeah, no rapping or rave samples, but I mean, the first Korn album had been released by then so

that one song could be a Tom Waitsian character portrait, the next could smoosh rave music into thrash metal, the next could be a macabre subterranean epic about wanking, and it could close on an aching John Barry cover.

Haha, at first I read this and thought you were talking about KFAD. Same could apply really. Maybe not the smoosh rave though, no. It doesn't have the wild'n'funky thing they'd done on previous albums - it was a much smokier, almost jazzy affair

the rave samples are so deeply buried in the mix they're hardly audible.

They're all over "It doesn't bother me / no" bit of the chorus! The production's fine, DL, I think it's your ears that need squeegeeing!!

i don't really hear any samples in that chorus but whatever, I love that song and Martin's guitar playing is a major reason why. I feel like he's not getting the credit he's due here. Yeah he's a metal guitarist, but he's not a wanky player, he has a really great command of tone of melody, everything he plays adds another dimension to the songs which is just gone after he left.

“Everything’s Ruined” lights up over a 15-second Martin solo. He absolutely contributed to what’s so great about that album.

The stuff that bores me on KFAD are the tracks like “Star AD,” “Take this Bottle,” and others I can’t think of currently. They’re fine songs, but they’re not what I’m looking for when I listen to FNM. I guess the unpredictability is part of the appeal, but I prefer the madcap nature or “Be Aggressive” to weird genre exercises.

Maybe the difference between my feelings about KFAD and some on this thread are that I never felt disappointed by KFAD when it came out. It didn't sound like a band running out of ideas to me - if anything it sounded like it had more elements of Disco Volante-era Bungle than Real Thing era FNM. As Martin's guitar work on AD is being underrated by some; so is Spruance's on KFAD. My one criticism of KFAD is that it's a song or two too long. I have this complaint about many CD-era albums that came out around that time. I would have been fine with them dropping "Take This Bottle" which I almost always skip.

I agree about "Star AD", but the song has grown on me over the years. "Take This Bottle" less so.

I love the guitar work, and solo, in "The Last to Know" so much.

I like Star AD a fair bit. Take This Bottle is... a kind of dull and overlong attempt at doomy country balladeering, yeah not essential

It makes me wonder really where FNM sit between themselves and Mr Bungle. Most of us, it's safe to say, come to Bungle for the madcap genre-fucking spectacle of it all, which is part of the appeal of Angel Dust it seems. So where does that leave Patton's FNM other than a more trad version of Bungle?

They're two different bands

They are, but don't you think Patton's fascinations had a huge influence on both bands (not to mention his other projects)?

I think there's the manic Naked City/Zorny every-song/sound-is-different side of Patton, but he's also into prolonged genre exercises (as is Zorn, sometimes, too). Exotica, Morricone soundtracks, lounge music, etc. It's been a while since I listened to many of his albums, but iirc the prolonged exercises often lacked the zip I wanted from him. "King for a Day," imo, sounds more akin to that stuff, less unhinged, more steady/disciplined, maybe.

I think Bungle was a bunch of friends from nowhere California growing up on the same influences and molding them into a sound, and FNM was 4 or 5 guys throwing their own unique backgrounds and obsessions into a bowl and seeing what comes out

Yeah, Bungle always seemed more like a team/gang. FNM, I don't know much about the individual dudes, how divergent were their tastes and backgrounds?

Like iirc when I talked to Billy, he told me that he basically sent the "Another Body Murdered" recording to Mike to do his thing on it and got back all those screams and was like "You sure this is what you want to do?" and obviously that's the version we hear today

Yeah, Bungle always seemed more like a team/gang. FNM, I don't know much about the individual dudes, how divergent were their tastes and backgrounds?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, September 22, 2023 2:55 PM (nineteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, Billy and Roddy were teenage punx who grew into post-punk, Puff liked Ozzy but all three of them were intrigued by rap and electro emerging in the early '80s, Jim was obviously a metal dude who was buddies with Metallica, Mike came from Bungleland which was basically bizarro thrash metal then Boingo ska then Zorn kitchen sink nuttiness and then he spent the Angel Dust press cycle basically trying to get people to listen to Hanatarash and Kids of Widney High

The disparateness is what makes them such a unique and special band

i think of patton as having a bigger creative force in bungle than he does in FNM.

Another Body Murdered is so savage.

Roddy and Billy went to high school together in LA

Xp it really is. 30 years on and it still sounds genuinely dangerous

Patton's ooohh-ah-oohhh bassline is the perfect stage-setter for the boo-yaa voices, he absolutely shouldn't have come up with a verse